Microcivilizations Topic

Future Game
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I think this thread was kinda left dangling and I don’t know if it ever really got resolved. I think microcivs are possible.
Issues:

  • So, how do you forge?

    • You forge. Yeah, a tiny forge would suck, but ants and especially their cousins termites and bees make structures MUCH larger than themselves. A termite mound made of clay that had a fire lit in it could resemble a simple iron-smelting operation, and the results could be dragged into another hot forge, where they could be shaved into iron flakes for use as ant scale tools by some other large structure, say obsidian blades and a gravity powered hammer or something. Why would they do this? because they’re smart and were using such structures for something like cooking whole corpses of large animals anyways. A stone age termite supercity could kill elephants.

  • Yeah, how do you fit that many neurons in their heads? I don’t think they could be smart.

    • You might not be able to. The human brain has 86 billion neurons or something insane like that, and it clearly weighs a few pounds. There’s no “quick trick you divide your brain size in half without loosing functionality” and even if there were you’d need more than a few such tricks to get the brain to the size of an ant, let alone and ant’s head. But, uh, yeah. Such tricks to exist. I shall list them
      • Megaphragma mymaripenne is a species of wasp that is the size of a single cell organism (and not an ostrich egg, if you’re worried about giant wasps). It has only a few thousand neurons, but that still seems like a lot for it’s size. It manages this by removing all the nuclei from it’s brain. This halfs the size, in one step. I mean. Nice! We can’t remove much else though, so unless we can achieve sapience with a reduced number of neurons, that isn’t enough.
      • Human brains are actually total overkill. You even seen that one CGP Grey vid about cutting your brain in half (“you are two” i think)? Yeah, you only need half a brain to display human level intelligence. You can’t recognize faces, but a feature reduction is expected when you half the number of required neurons.
      • Yeah, which of these features do we need? Humans have fantastic vision, and we are highly adapted to throwing things. Who needs either! Ants have tiny compound eyes, and simple weak arms (irl only legs but), throwing is a useless skill. About half the cortex is for vision, and the cortex is about 40% of the brain by volume. Half the size of it to drop color and a lot of complex abilities for a 20% size reduction. Most of the left side of your cerebellum is for talking, and do we really need learned language? Ants do well with pheromones and simple communication, one quarter of the size should cover that, and upgrade it a bit for abstract ideas, though this is a bit iffy. The cerebellum is 10% of the brain by volume, so that isn’t a huge gain. But… it has the most cells ??
      • YEP! 10% of the brain has most of the neurons! The brain doesn’t take advantage of the size advantage of granule cells, which have itty bitty cell bodies. They do need to be attached to large Purkinje cells but a few hundred thousand can share one, and we can take the nucleus out of them and the Cerebellum has that anyways. Neuroscientists and psychologists and whatnot: SHOOT THIS DOWN I AM 110% SAYING NONSENSE this will almost certainly not work, I however, don’t know why not! If the rest of the brain had the density of the cerebellum it would be at least a tenth the size, add that to a cerebellum reduced in size by 75% by the last step and we cut the whole brain to 11.5% the size over two steps.
        11.5%, divided by two twice by the first two steps equals 0.375%.
    • If we use the 1130 cm^3 average for women (was going to use Einstein but couldn’t find it), we get 4.2375 milliliters, or a fifth of a cubic inch. This is way larger than a small worker ant, but could easily fit inside a termite queen, not even needing the 4 inch/about 10 cm ones. I can’t find data on the volume of a warrior termite but I suspect a large one could fit this brain. Well, you know what they say about units. Playing with them is fun! I love the idea of simplifying mpg to mm^2, so I’ll get my own volume data from mass data and approximating density, because termites can barely float. That tells us they can’t be denser than water, so I’ll be conservative and assume water. A warrior of the larger species is 0.12 milliliters. (source for mass) Yeah that doesn’t work.
    • Okay. New idea. You know how people get confused and think the queen bees/ants/termites rule the colony? I know it doesn’t work like that, but why not! A moderately sized queen termite could forgo all senses and motor skills but add back in language centers to get the same brain size, and ordinary, tiny, termite/ants could just be pointed where they want. A supercolony can have many queens, and especially if the queens regularly talked to one another to get social intelligence, a colony could get hundreds of queens smaller than a slug or big spider, and form a huge super city with millions of workers and warriors.

  • You likely think that sounds dumb, but you might also think you can’t go to space in tiny rockets. Well, you really shouldn’t. It’s a terrible idea.

    • However! Why make tiny rockets? Make big ones! Creatures like this would be accustomed to making megastructures, and with good communication, they might not need to risk a single brainy queen life, if they can boss the workers around with radio. And if you want big brains onboard for like, a mars mission, do it!
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an idea to tack on to that, the queens don’t need any senses of their own to communicate with eachother if they have some way to link their brains together.

  • the drones could become tubes that transport information, fluids, and nutrients, and possibly sensory organs for the queens as well, at their queen’s request.

  • with that, there could be workers that turn into a digestive, respiratory, or excretory system with an exoskeleton and connect to the queen via the drones, making the queens able to dedicate even more resources to their brains and making more colony members.

  • in addition to that, if all of the queens in one cluster are genetically related, or, even better, genetically identical, all but one can forgo their reproductive responsibilities and become basically just dense brains, while the one that didn’t dedicates all its resources to its reproductive and circulatory system, making the colonies grow faster and smarter than they would have otherwise

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And how? Only the queens are sapient.

Also, intelligent queens are evolutionary disadvantageous, intelligence takes energy, which means that they consume more food while not producing more eggs. As such an intelligent queen will produce less eggs for each unit of food than a not-intelligent queen.

In addition, in many ant species the workers will kill the queen if it doesn’t lay enough eggs, which further discourages intelligent queens since they produce less eggs.

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Imagined a queen that lives in close proximity to a junction in the hive having a beneficial effect from noticing and relaying pheromones around her, and keeping priorities straight. Since she never has to leave and go do stuff she can learn a variety of things, and becomes a sanity check for workers switching jobs bc they don’t have knowledge of anything but their current task. Works better for bees since they do the little dances and are on average way smarter than ants. Might also work better for a king than a queen, like some termites have. The queen needs to constantly make babies, and has a job she has GOT to do, the king doesn’t do as much to my knowledge, but might spend it’s time lazing around in an area with a lot of information, and could relay it the way I detailed. That does rely on the cooperation of males who are all cucking (for lack of a better word, i meant it to sound hostile) each other for any social stuff, which uhh, is not a given, they might just do court intrigue until the smart genes die out.

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intelligent queens making less eggs doesn’t matter as much if there are more queens that spend less energy than the queens of other ant-like species, and if they live in clusters they can communicate much faster, effectively multiplying the amount of thinking power per queen room by the amount of queens that can be in one cluster. and if they connect their circulatory systems that increases their overall survival chance by more the more that queens in the cluster specialize for intelligence, as long as some specialize for reproduction by enough to keep the amount of offspring the cluster has the same. however, since the more intelligent queens wouldn’t have as much energy to put into reproducing, they wouldn’t produce as many queens, so, to evolve sapience in the first place the intelligent queens would all need to be related to at least one egg laying queen.

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I kinda find the merging a bit severe but yeah, forgoing as many body parts as possible makes sense.

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I was going to ask “Would ants even need stone tools that would benefit from a metal upgrade?” but I decided to ask chatgpt first and it came up with scenerios

  1. Ants in a particularly hard-soiled environment struggle to excavate tunnels with their mandibles. With metal digging tools, they can break through the tough soil more quickly and create more extensive and stable underground networks.
  2. A colony is frequently attacked by larger predators. Ants with metal-tipped spears or cutting tools can inflict more damage on these predators, effectively deterring them from future attacks.
  3. Ants discover a source of hard-shelled nuts that are too tough to break open with their mandibles. Using metal chisels or hammers, they can crack the nuts open and access the nutritious contents inside. It also said: they could use tools to break down tough plant fibers or insect exoskeletons into more manageable pieces.
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glass weapons would work far better for ants than metal weapons would, since the metal ones would constantly be deforming in a way that doesn’t inflict more damage without needing more force applied, but a way ants could use metal to deter predators is setting up spike traps that have all the spikes bigger than an individual ant, to the point all the ants leaving the colony can jus walk on them.

the ants would be able to find spots to grab the shells of the nuts and carry them up a tree to drop them onto a rock far faster than they’d figure out how thick the metal needs to be to get it to stop bending when they try to slice the shells with it, and if they have fire already, anything with a shell that tough and no way for the ants to eat it without penetrating the shell, will trap steam inside itself until it pops more violently than popcorn when put in fire.

which means that this one

is the one the ai actually knew what it was talking about with, and the speed the ants could dig their tunnels would speed up drastically if they had tools that let them use both of their mandibles to punch a single hole in hard soil/rock with twice the force each mandible can apply, and/or a tool that let them bite to split rocks and soil as opposed to trying to crush it, so they could break open rocks and stuff easier. though the tools would look drastically different from the ones we have that do similar things just due to how metal acts at that scale.

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